Marketing and Selling Through The Mind Of Your Customer...

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence and scientific brain research showing that human emotions and unconscious plays a major role in consumer selection of products and services.

As our multi cultural society matures; it becomes evident that those companies and individual who want to advantage themselves in sales and marketing must understand perception and mind of other cultural groups. That will require a better understanding of your conscious and unconscious mind - how memory, experience, and associated emotions exert a force on thinking and buying behaviors of consumers.

According to Gerald Zaltman, Professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School: as much as 95 percent of consumers’ thinking occurs in their unconscious minds. Much thinking surfaces through metaphors and consumers’ memories which are much more malleable than previously thought— which is why "confidence" adds great persuasive power. Artificial confidence does not work, but authentic confidence will decisively engender a winning edge every time when a salesperson truly believes in his/her products and services.

Fostering a shift in sales and marketing will require a deeper understanding of how pervasive unconscious mind of consumer works. Breaking into new ground requires breaking out of traditional thinking about features and benefits selling. You need to enter into mental activity of unconscious thoughts, feelings, memories, intentions, metaphors and just how they direct consumers’ attention, influence perception and manipulate their decisions and actions. 6 key strategic solutions for sales and marketing.

1. Metaphor making in mind of consumer is a powerful fundamental that helps them make sense of information received. When eliciting information from a potential client. I asked him what success felt like. His metaphor was; "Success feels like power of driving a Porsche down highway at top speed." Tying his metaphor to several service benefits closed sale securely. Understanding and having collected a large range of metaphors consumers’ use to think about you, your services and products enable you to sculpt a more effecting communication strategy and increase potential of a purchase.

Promotional Marketing Products - Selecting the Perfect Item

Written by Cindy Carrera

People are known to shop on impulse- buying an item just because it is on sale, or purchasing something because it looks great in store. When shopping for promotional items, you really can't succumb to impulses. Instead, you must carefully decide on an item that will help meet your objectives.

A career school admissions representative who worked with high school market once wanted to buy magnets to give to people. Although magnets were in budget, they would not really do job of spreading word among other high school students, as magnets would be at home on fridge where maybe a handful of other students would see. A better idea was to give out day planners (only to enrolled students) that they could carry to school everyday where hundreds of classmates could see. "Oh- that's where I'm going to school after graduation" they would say when asked about school's name on planner. Rachel, rep, was hurt that magnets she liked did not get ordered. But, Rachel does not have a marketing background and she didn't understand that these items served another purpose.

So, when ordering your items before you even browse pages of catalogs or websites, you want to have some objectives in mind. You would not want to invest money in an item that doesn't match tactic. Think about these:

-Do you want to stimulate trade show traffic? -Do you want to use these as sales aids? -Are these going to be premiums? -Are you introducing a new product/service? -Do you want to thank current customers? -Are these for an event giveaway? -Are these to motivate employees? -Are you trying to gain back lost business? -Are you trying to improve customer service? -Are these going to be used as gifts? -Are you using them to supplement a direct mail campaign?

These are just a few questions you will want to ask yourself. If you are looking to supplement a general direct mail campaign, you will want to keep postage costs in mind. Perhaps mailing a magnet, sticker, pocket calendar, pen or pencil would be something good to use. You would not want to mail a t-shirt or mug- that would be very pricey for response rate of direct mail! If you are doing a campaign to target past customers or are just doing a smaller-gauge mailing, perhaps something a little bigger would work.